Tuesday, May 8, 2012

April 30th 2012 TX Panhandle 287 Boundary Cells

1. (06Z-10Z) Boundary from late night active SVR WX.
2. (17Z-21Z) Dryline initiate west of Amarillo.
3. (22Z-01Z) a.Not enough helicity to support upper level
b.HP dominant
c.Timing and location set things out of order
4. Chase 3 was fun and awesome in everyway.

In Chase 3 Shep and I took two people with us. One problem I had my Saturn. My Saturn is smaller than most electric cars lol. For all of us to go we took two vehicles. Brandon Rycroft is a friend and experienced chaser chasing with people trained at the NWS in Norman and local media. His skills of navigation were really great since he lives in wild lands of OK/TX. So Shep rode with Rycroft, and Jamie, another great friend from Elk City hopped in my vehicle. I was excited to take people cause I love the environment of having other people to enjoy weather with in the plains.

Jamie had let me take her husband a couple times, so she really wanted to have an opportunity to go see a tornado from a safe distance with us :) It may not have been class A chasing. It sure was fun and we were able to see explosive updrafts, little structure, lots of rain and hail. Now we didn't drive through the core of fear of losing windshields thankfully. So this writeup wouldve been different if I had punched the core as well lol, instead there were reports of baseballs and softballs destroying other friends' windshields, lol. Glad all are ok though. We were able to punch the backside of the RFD and got into golfballs. That was fun to run out in the hail outflow. Jamie even got to experience a little hail punching outside as well running from the gas station to the my car. Pic Fail.
Will have to report another time.

At the end of the chase a line of cells merged moving through SW Oklahoma and TX Redriver area/ Hwy 287. So we followed behind these cells while watching some beautiful anvil crawlers and spectacular cloud-to-cloud lightning.